How Much Do You Know about McLuhan?
Simple test: are you surprised that he’s on this list?
De Anima
You may remember that Aristotle attributes to Democritus a story of Daedalus making a wooden statue of Aphrodite move by pouring mercury in it (De anima, 406b). I wondered, however naively, for what purpose until I then remembered the story of Asterion’s birth.
I should consult a scholarly edition for more details, I suppose.
Dylan As Singer
I have a tin ear, and I once, remembering this opinion of Donald Fagen’s, played “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” for a date skeptical, let us say, of this:
An astounding record. You get to hear on this what a fantastic singer he was. His range, which now, as far as I can tell, has reduced to a perfect fifth, used to be enormous. He starts very high on the verse and then drops an octave in about a second and sounds like he’s doing a duet with himself. A perfect record.
On Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service
The second stanza of this poem runs:
In the beginning was the Word.
Superfetation of τὸ ἒν,
And at the mensual turn of time
Produced enervate Origen.
An earlier version was:
In the beginning was the Word.
Superfetation of τὸ ἒν,
And at the menstrual turn of time
Produced the castrate Origen.
The changes were Pound’s suggestions, apparently. Generally speaking, Pound’s revisions of Eliot’s poetry tended not to be bowdlerizing; but it’s arguable that they are here. “Menstrual” and “castrate” both better establish the contrast between Origen and Sweeney shifting from ham to ham in his bath at the end.
Web Transcription Perils
I learned from the wallace-l list, which I recently rejoined, that the D. T. Max article I mentioned earlier misquoted Larry McCaffrey’s interview with Wallace from the Review of Contemporary Fiction. The transcribed web version has Wallace reporting that “most ‘familiarity’ is meditated and delusive” instead of “mediated.” The print version is available as a scanned pdf in EBSCO.
I last made this joke when a Malcolm Gladwell article identified Linus Torvalds as Norwegian, but it sounds like this one landed on the Bright Lights, Big City fact-checker’s desk. I did not notice the error when I read the article myself, I should note.
Map of the Interviews in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
Is here. I created this quickly, without checking to see if some other enthusiast had done this before and with more detail.
A couple of things I noted: 1) I cannot find a place called “Drury” in Utah. I’ve pinned it in Salt Lake City. I don’t know if this is deliberate, the name of a place (or airport, though I would have seen that I suspect), or a suburb that’s not showing up on the maps (St. Davids, PA also takes some fiddling to find on google maps for some reason). 2) I seem to recall the interviewer being based on or having some similarities to Wallace’s sister. I don’t know if that would have any geographical relevance here. The New Haven interview (and frequency of I95 corridor in the represented selection) suggests that this may be a student at Yale or some other northeastern university. The academic nature of the questions we infer that she asks along with the title does suggest a student, though this could also be a type of independent art or book project. (She does seem to have a good amount of disposable income.) The feeling I get from the Roswell interview is that this is a man she sat next to on a late flight into the Atlanta airport and whom she went home (or partying) with when she missed her connection.
Must of
I’ve written about the apparently inexplicable use of homophonic spellings with this construction in dialogue in M. John Harrison and Cormac McCarthy before. Here’s another example from Wallace’s Brief Interviews: “The bastard even must of faked that call” (26).
I’m surprised that Wallace, of all the writers I’ve seen this in, didn’t think about this. Perhaps if he did, he had more a direct free indirect style justification for it.
Shelby Foote's Standards
This is from the NYT interview with Cormac McCarthy:
Saul Bellow, who sat on the committee that in 1981 awarded him a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called genius grant, exclaims over his “absolutely overpowering use of language, his life-giving and death-dealing sentences.” Says the historian and novelist Shelby Foote: “McCarthy is the one writer younger than myself who has excited me. I told the MacArthur people that he would be honoring them as much as they were honoring him.”
Wallace's Death Is Not the End
I’ve done some preliminary rummaging around on the internet for commentary on this short piece from Brief Interviews and have found little. The title appealed to people writing about Wallace after his death, I suppose, but I didn’t see much commentary on the story itself. (The archives of the wallace discussion list seemed to be closed to search engines, and I actually didn’t track that down and search the archives, which a good scholar would have done.)
The Legal Memo as Literary Genre
Can anyone think of a book which uses them almost exclusively? Real life has provided some very good models, as you know if you follow the news. I could imagine someone publishing the Yoo memos, as is, in chronological order, in 1997, and winning all relevant prizes.
I feel like there’s an obvious example, but I refuse to research it; and I know that one of my erudite readers will supply some examples, if they exist.